Report Reveals Charter School Segregation

A new report from Penn State law professor Preston Green III called “Chartering Equity: Using Charter School Legislation and Policy to Advance Educational Opportunity,” targets segregation in Charter Schools.

According to Green’s reports, Charter Schools are more likely to be dominated by one race than public schools and also lead to segregation in public schools.

The Huffington Post reports:

“I think that charters are an engine of racial segregation. They are more segregated than public schools and cause public schools to be more segregated than they otherwise would be,” he said. According to a report he plans to release Friday, from 2010-2011 almost 90 percent of black charter-school students in the Twin Cities are in segregated schools — a number that actually increased by 8 percentage points over the last decade.

A common problem, Green said, is that charter schools often do not comply with federal civil-rights statutes. According to Orfield, they are legally responsible to do so, but are rarely challenged. For example, previous Supreme Court cases found “single-race schools were intentional segregation,” Orfield said. “But charter schools haven’t been challenged in this way, because people don’t have a picture of how big a part of urban education they are.”